Tulip Eats Cornflakes
by TulipEatsCornflakes
Summary: Tulip eats cornflakes.


_Where are the cornflakes?_ Tulip wondered to herself, searching through all of the cabinets in her kitchen. She saw bread, peanut butter, toaster pastries, and even other types of cereal, but there were no cornflakes to be found. And she didn't want any of those other things. She wanted cornflakes.

"Mom, where are the cornflakes?!" Tulip shouted.

"They should be right there, honey!" her mom shouted back from somewhere upstairs. "I just bought some yesterday."

"Well, they aren't here..." Tulip grumbled to herself, checking each cabinet one more time. She saw the keys to her mom's car on the counter and decided that she'd check if her mom just forgot to bring them inside. "They aren't in the cabinets! I'm going to check the car!" she called, not waiting for a response before opening the door and going out into the driveway.

She pressed the button on the key to unlock the car, then checked the front and the back. There weren't any bags, so she checked the trunk. There was one solitary grocery bag, and Tulip breathed a sigh of relief. Checking the bag, she found...Generi-O's? _What?_

"Mom, you bought the wrong cereal!" Tulip shouted as she came back inside with the bag.

"No need to shout. I'm right here," her mom said, walking into the main room from the kitchen around the corner.

"I wanted cornflakes," Tulip said. "You bought Generi-O's."

"What?" her mom said in confusion. "No, I didn't. I'm sure I bought cornflakes." She took her car keys and the bag from Tulip and pulled out the box. It was a box of Generi-O's.

"Huh. I guess I did buy Generi-O's." Tulip's mom said. "Sorry!"

Sighing, Tulip said, "Whatever," and begrudgingly took the box from her mom. She went to the kitchen, opened the box, took a bowl from the cabinet, and poured herself some cereal. To her surprise, it wasn't Generi-O's. It was cornflakes!

"Wait, what?" Tulip said, so surprised that she said this aloud rather than just thinking it. She took the bag out from inside the box, and sure enough, it was cornflakes. But the box still said it was Generi-O's.

"Hey, mom, come look at this!" Tulip said, wanting to confirm that she wasn't hallucinating. Her mom came and looked, and after a moment, she agreed that the bag did in fact contain cornflakes.

"Must have been a mixup at the factory," her mom said. "Maybe the store knew and they labeled them as cornflakes on the shelf. It might explain how I ended up buying them instead."

"I suppose," Tulip said, squinting at the box and the bag in turn as if expecting one or the other to spontaneously change substance. Finally, she shrugged, got the milk out of the refrigerator, and poured it into the bowl with the cornflakes.

_Whoops, forgot a spoon_, she thought, and went to get one. When she returned to the bowl with the spoon, she did a double take. She could have sworn that she just saw Generi-O's in the bowl instead of cornflakes, but when she looked again, it was cornflakes all the way down.

After a moment of hesitation, she took a spoonful of cereal and slowly began to raise it to her mouth. Then she stopped, put it back in the bowl, and stirred everything a little, lifting spoonful after spoonful out and examining each carefully to make sure that nothing had changed. Still cornflakes.

Finally, she decided that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on after all - she must have just been imagining things. The cornflakes were getting soggy, and it was time to eat before they were ruined. She lifted a spoonful again and brought it to her mouth. As the cereal slid onto her tongue and she began to chew, she felt the familiar taste and feel of cornflakes in her mouth and relaxed...but only for a moment.

As she continued to chew, something changed. The cornflakes no longer felt so...cornflakey. They no longer tasted like cornflakes were supposed to taste. They tasted...well, they tasted like Generi-Os.

_What the heck?_ Tulip thought, reflexively spitting the spoonful of cereal back out again. In its chewed-up state, there wasn't really any way to tell the difference by looking at it, but she felt sure that she had just been chewing Generi-O's. Her hand shaking, she slowly placed the spoon back into the bowl and got up from the table. She walked to her family's desktop computer in the other room.

Finding that it was off, she turned it on and waited for it to boot up. Normally, she would just use her own computer, but it had been having issues recently and she still needed to take it to get repaired. This computer was relatively old, so startup was going to take a few minutes.

"I'm heading off to work!" her mom called from the direction of the door a few minutes later as the login screen finally came up and Tulip logged on.

"Alright," Tulip said, deciding not to concern her mom with her strange cereal troubles any more than she already had. It wasn't like she could do anything about it. "See you later!"

Pulling up an Internet browser, she searched for "Generi-O's cornflakes" (without the quotes), hoping to find someone else who had experienced this situation. It would be less concerning if it had happened to others. But there were no relevant results. She tried other search terms, searched for well over an hour, but there were no relevant results.

Conceding with a hint of dread that she probably wasn't going to find anything, she closed the browser and logged off. She might as well throw the cereal away and put the bowl in the dishwasher now. Cornflakes or not, it had been out for too long to eat at this point. She walked back to the kitchen and turned toward the table where she had been sitting.

The bowl was gone.


End file.
